This virtual machine replaces the previous Visual Studio 2013 ALM virtual machine which was based on Preview bits. This is a publicly downloadable set of content, so you may feel free to share this with your customers, partners, etc. It’s designed to be both a tool for demonstrating our ALM story and as a self-paced training environment for learning how to use our ALM tools.

When working with more than one account, you frequently get an error trying to connect to a TFS server. This happens both in the on premises or int the TFSPREVIEW.COM service. The most painful process, suggests you clear all your ached credentials, but this is a real pain, and you’ll have to do it every time you change the server/project that requires a different account.

Being a senior consultant in the Information Worker area, Sharepoint and development are my middle names on a day-by-day basis. Every year I actively work on 15 to 20 projects, most of them in different clients, with different teams.

As most of you, I simply feel repetitive work is a serious waste of time and resources, for which I don’t have a miracle cure, but I do have a couple of what I like to call good practices, that help me reduce repetitive work and thus elevate my productivity levels to a reasonable self-satisfying level. Here are some of them:

Code/project management: as a basic requirement for my projects I use TFS (FULL STOP!). TFS allows me to manage development, source code, and all the goodies that follow a project from its early stages of requirements and use cases, till the production phases of the project life-cycle. Associate this platform with Excel, Project, Visio, Word and a couple more

Coding in Visual Studio: this is probably the MS tool that makes me prouder. I have worked in very heterogeneous development environments, but till today, VS is on top of my list of development environments. You can spice it up with some extensions that give you even further control/functionality. Some of the ones I find most interesting are:

Build environments using VM Factory: when you have to setup development environments for a team of developers and on top of that, prepare test environments in a regular basis, then is when VM factory comes to the rescue. Template your VMs and generate them on request with complete software automation process, which includes updates, platform configuration, optimizations… basically, anything you can install or script.

Regarding test environments, I strongly recommend you take a look at Lab Management Guidance. This project tops on VM factory to guide you to build your lab environments using VS Lab Manager (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=230951).

This pretty much covers my main project day life with Visual Studio and TFS 2010!

Now, if you want to have some fun, check out the new wave of Visual Studio 2011 coming out. New EDI, TFS and the TFServices are better than ever. Also the VS ALM Rangers team has shipped a new set of projects ready for the new platforms that are really worth wile. Here are some links for your greedy thirst for coding fun 🙂 :

On 29th of February, for the 1st time in our history, the Visual Studio ALM Rangers sim-shipped a dozen projects to Codeplex in conjunction with Dev11 beta. These projects deliver technical readiness content to the Microsoft field and external MVPs who leverage this content in their customer engagements. If a project includes features or tools, the source code is included in the download to support customization. See more details on our Rangers blog.

Who are Rangers?

Visual Studio ALM Rangers mission is to provide out of band solutions for missing features or guidance. Rangers are from Microsoft Product Group, members of Microsoft Services, Microsoft Most Valued Professionals (MVPs) and technical specialists from technology communities around the globe, giving you a real-world view from field practitioners. Rangers are distributed across the globe and have typically higher customer priorities. Usually, they work on Ranger projects in their private free time.

Our biggest gig ever!

70 volunteer Rangers worked together with product group members to create 20 Ranger solutions. This number broke all our past records and is the best example of what my manager calls “the Ranger muscle”. Additionally, this entire effort was time constrained between //build/ and Dev11 beta.

Shipped projects

This is the list of projects which sim-shipped with Dev11 beta. The links take you directly to the Codeplex project site.

Rangers create content just like any other engineering project. We use TFS and work item tracking for every Ranger project regardless of the content type. Our production process is RUCK which is loose Scrum. Our requirements engineering uses Epics, User Stories and Standard Personas to exactly specify what business value and production improvement must be delivered. These detailed user stories are then converted to HOLs (Hands On Lab) which in turn are leveraged as tests. To summarize, we construct guidance as an end2end engineering process.

Rangers and TFS Preview

Rangers were the 1st TAP customer who adopted TFS Preview across the board. We joined the TAP program but quickly moved to production after moving all current 20+ Ranger projects to TFS Preview. Just as a side note, we dog-fooded our own TFS Integration Platform to migrate our projects to the new environment.

Why beta sim-ship?

We heard from the field that readiness content and practical guidance always comes too late and mostly with low quality. With the Dev11 Readiness projects, we addressed both issues head-on. For our primary target group, ALM delivery experts, as technical field or as MVP, the primetime starts with beta. And of course for Rangers, that is the best way to deliver our mission statement which is all about accelerating adoption of Visual Studio.

The P&P team is dedicating some time to create guidance into sharepoint development. IMHO this is a most valuable input as it has been for so many other areas, from patterns to factories. The final output will be published on MSDN, but in the meantime you can take a peek into the current version at http://www.codeplex.com/spg.

from the proect site:

“We plan to provide guidance to customers on how to build SharePoint Intranet Applications. This includes guidance on how to Architect, Design, and Develop applications as well as best practices. “